The European Court of Human Rights (the Court) has been invoking the vulnerability criterion to overcome the drawbacks of cases concerning Article 14 of the European Convention on Human Rights, the prohibition of discrimination. This new criterion, allowing the Court to favour the applicants, highlights the applicants’ group affiliation. However, whether this criterion is effective in protecting vulnerable applicants against discrimination is doubtful. To examine this, I divide the Court's approach to Article 14 before and after the application of the vulnerability criterion. I argue that vulnerability criterion was used to fix the drawbacks of Article 14, but eventually backfired. The concept of vulnerability has been ambiguous, inconsistently used by the Court, and paternalistic. I suggest the Court focus on individual autonomy rather than grouping the applicants to improve their legal reasoning of Article 14.
Before non-European regions adopted international law, a different set of law of territory governed the non-European regions. Notwithstanding their differences, international courts and tribunals have approached non-European territorial disputes through a single lens of Eurocentric international law. The general claim of this article is that international courts and tribunals should approach non-European territorial disputes with special consideration to account for the region’s historical system. This article case studies the China-Vietnam dispute in the South China Sea to advance this claim. Through the case study, I argue that East Asian concepts of sovereignty do not equate with those employed by Eurocentric international law. I then suggest guidelines for considering regional systems when ruling on non-European territorial disputes. If international courts and tribunals do not change their legal approach, this not only distorts the historical realities of the non-European regions but also results in unfair dispute settlements.
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